Tokyo Itself is A Lost Connection

I was on my way to school Monday, when I received a message from my teacher that all classes at Waseda had been suddenly canceled until May 29th because of the recent measles outbreaks in Tokyo. My first thought was to run the travel agency and see if there were any flights available to exotic places that other students had gone to over spring break but I hadn't gotten a chance to yet. Rather than travel alone, I found 2 friends who were willing to spend the money to go. Since most cheap tour packages that include flight and hotel were booked, we decided to go from June 1-4 to Bali (^___^) According to my aunt, it's a honeymoon destination, so I'm really looking forward to it.

The only thing is, in the mean time what's to do?? I feel like I've toured too much of Tokyo and Japan already.... and it's getting wayyyy to hot to sit at home... So I was looking for apartments in SF for next semester on craigslist. I was doing that today too, but eventually got bored and started looking at other parts of craigslist, when I found this post under Tokyo>>Lost Connections:

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"The City of Tokyo is itself a Missed Connection...

This is the conclusion I've roughly arrived at after spending what I thought was a sufficient amount of time there. But it wasn't enough time. Or more precisely, different rules seemed to apply to time. There were apparitions of faces in endless crowds. So many faces, but none that lit up in recognition just for me. Who knew me, or even wanted to know me.

It hit me one night on the Hibiya line. Last train. A man and a woman who had no connection other than a shared train seat. They had both fallen asleep and their heads and shoulders were leaning in toward each other with a kind of unconscious intimacy. Could it be that they had found in sleep what we could not in waking? But Borges had already spoken about that, hadn't he?: "...Que mientras dormimos aquí, estamos despiertos en otro lado y que así cada hombre es dos hombres." ("While we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere, and thus every man is two men.")

What's more, an advertisement above them read, in strangely happy red lettering, "Decide who you love best by November 31st." I stared at that sign for a long time. Like it was some oracle, some talisman, some harbinger of an alternate future. Why this arbitrary deadline? But I decided that sign was written just for me and so I wanted to comply with its order. But I couldn't. Or wouldn't. In any case, I didn't. And in this way, I lost you.

Do you remember the night we sat up smoking on your balcony, looking at the clouds moving in over the city, tracking the blinking lights and the trains snaking through the punctutated darkness toward who-knows-where? We decided the city had grown up enough to take care of itself. That if we all died tomorrow most of what we saw--the neon, the factories, the trains, the great modern pyramids of office building architecture--would go on. They do not need us. They might have at some point in the past, but no longer.

I have a letter from you from long ago. I saved it because it contains the most beautiful and most heart-rending line anyone has ever written to me. You wrote, "The time we spent together was wonderful, and I felt very close to you for a moment."

I missed you. I lost you forever to this city."

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wow, i so know how this person feels...i have always said that Tokyo is the Lonely City of Lost Souls, but this person explained so eloquently. I meet so many people everyday, but I feel like I lost my connection to them too quickly, or it never has any real chance to form... Even now as I have been sitting around my house or gone out somewhere by myself, I don't feel that strong connection to many of the people I know here in Tokyo.

...a few months after I came here, I felt like I lost my "light", the 明るさ of my personality... I don't know if I ever got it back, but I know I've been able to fight the against the darkness that threaten to swallow me.

who ever you are, I hope you can recover what this City has taken from you...